So far, Beijing police has confirmed 37 deaths, while 57,000 were evacuated from their homes.

The failure of this motorway, as well many others, to cope with the rainfall has sparked anger in the Chinese capital, which has spent billions of pounds on its infrastructure in recent years.

"Chinese cities are apparently unpractised in facing disasters such as Saturday's torrential downpour," said the Global Times, a government-run newspaper, in an editorial. "If so much chaos can be triggered in Beijing, the capital of the nation, problems in urban infrastructure of many other places can only be worse."

The authorities in Shanghai confirmed that their drainage system would have fared even worse: only able to absorb less than a quarter of the rainfall that hit Beijing.

However, Zhang Junfeng, a senior engineer at the Transport ministry, pointed out that six months of water had fallen in a single day in Beijing. "No drainage system could withstand such rain," he said.

The deluge caused more than 31 roads to cave in, and led to more than 10 billion yuan (£1 billion) of damage, said Pan Anjun, deputy chief of the Beijing flood control headquarters, to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

Elsewhere in Fangshan, the outlying region which seems worst hit by the storm, the damage was immense, but few if any casualties occurred, despite widespread rumours to the contrary. At the Shidu scenic area, a broken road meant that up to 10,000 tourists remained stranded.

In Hebeizhen, a village in the mountains, an entire street was swept away, after a torrent of water crumbled a factory and four houses.

"The water was coming up to our necks at one point," said Hao Sufeng, whose sister owned the factory. "When the water came, it just burst through the buildings." Another resident said he had rescued one couple who were standing on a closet to escape the deluge, and that the flood had not caused any death.

More than nine million people have so far expressed their views on the Chinese internet over the handling of the storm, with many choosing to vent their anger.

"Beijing has been defeated by a huge rainstorm, the city's infrastructure has failed, there is nothing here to be proud of," posted one person on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, under the name Zhulidemixu.

Meanwhile, at least three people died in the neighbouring province of Hebei, 17 people are missing in Shaanxi province, and eight people died in Sichuan province.